The Kids in the Hall
Death Comes to Town
DVD
Directed by Kelly Makin
Starring Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson
A&E Entertainment
Release Date: May 24, 2011

I grew up watching The Kids in the Hall, a half-hour-long sketch comedy series from Canada starring a popular comedy troupe whose core cast of five founding members – Scott Thompson, Dave Foley, Mark McKinney, Bruce McCulloch, and Kevin McDonald – has never changed in their existence. It remains one of the funniest television shows in the histories of both television and things that are funny. The Kids came into my life at a time when I had a very conventional view of what comedy was. Then again I must have been all of ten years old when I first saw The Kids in the Hall arriving on American shores and being resigned to the netherworld of late Friday nights on HBO in the early 1990s. It didn’t have a fraction of the cultural impact of the Beatles coming to the U.S. to play on The Ed Sullivan Show, but it meant a hell of a lot more important to me. The Kids’ unorthodox (to me at least) amalgamation of off-kilter and experimental humor with more broader comedy to appeal to those with a kindergarten student’s comedic sensibility, but it was all done the Kids’ way so that even it when it seemed like they were playing it safe their loyal fans never assumed they were selling out.